Whisky Addicted to Pleasure

'This is the River Clyde in Glasgow.'

'250 years ago, this was one of Britain's great trading centres.

'It was the hub of a huge empire that stretched

'from the Caribbean to China.

'An empire founded on trade,

'in which simple plants were transformed by human labour

'to become hugely profitable global commodities.'

'The trade in sugar,

'tobacco,

'opium

'and whisky transformed our society, our bodies and our minds.'

Over the centuries, we've learned to love these products.

Their smell, their taste, the effect they've had on us.

They've become increasingly guilty pleasures,

which are still with us, still part of us.

Today, millions of us can't do without at least some of them,

so how did we become so hooked?

'The answer will take me on a journey across the world.'

Oh, my God! That's powerful.

'And inside our minds and bodies too.'

Bye.

Gosh, that's good, isn't it?

'In the pursuit of pleasure.'

Here's to the next time, then.

'Yes, Scotch whisky is the true product of Scotland.

'It cannot be made anywhere else.

'Bottled, wrapped and packed into cases, the final article,

'as perfect as care and consistency at every stage can make it,

'is ready for the consumer,

'but it all starts up in the Scottish Highlands.

'Up in the clear air of the peat-covered moors,

'where the waters of some crystal stream tumble quietly over its ancient rocks

'and the hereditary skill of the Scottish distilleryman

'is applied with conscientious efficiency to his superb craft.'

'Oh, yes. It was carefully made. It still is,

'but was it and is it carefully drunk?'

When I was growing up,

people weren't over-strict about kids in pubs.

In fact, you'd get sent down to get your dad

or your Uncle Joe and tell them to get up for dinner.

You'd find them there propping up the bar, a half and a half,

which is a half-pint of heavy and whisky chaser.

That's what all the working men drank.

The men who weren't working too.

Drunk in the Dundee pubs, and around closing time,

nine o'clock in my day.

Nine o'clock, they'd come out, stagger a wee bit

and probably, more likely, fall over.

A regular occurrence.

'These days, whisky is without doubt a source of national pride.

'An almost unique phenomenon.

'One of the few growth industries in the entire United Kingdom.'

'Its reputation abroad has never been higher.

'Last year, it generated £4.2 billion in foreign sales alone.'

'But its past was more troubled

'and Scotland's history tangled up in it.

'It's like he kind of double vision. They come as a pair.

'The proud Highlander and the drunken Scot.'

That's how we're seen, that's how we sell ourselves.

Bonnie Scotland, the nation that's 80% alcohol by volume.

'Nobody knows when whisky was first made in Scotland.

'When it first appears in our written history,

'it's already well-established.

'In 1494, King James IV of Scotland

'orders a large quantity of aqua vitae from a monastery.

'Aqua vitae, the Latin name for a kind of alcohol

'appearing in other European countries about the same time.

'Each country translated from the Latin to name their drink.'

The French called it eau de vie, the Scandinavians called it aqvavit,

and the Gaelic-speaking Scots called it uisge-beatha.

Uisge-beatha - water of life.

'Every country faced botanical reality when it set out to make

'its water of life.

'The basic ingredient had to grow nearby.

'The French used grapes or fruit,

'the Scandinavians and the Scots used grain.

'Barley. It was Scotland's staple food crop.

'The people who first-term barley into strong alcohol

'weren't distillers.

'There was no whisky industry.

'There were simply farmers with some surplus barley after harvest home.'

'On the island of Lewis, the Abhainn Dearg distillery

'occasionally runs a small old still in honour of whisky's history.'

I suppose this was how it started.

This is how it began?

Most distilleries in Scotland, or round the Highlands,

they just started off as a small still.

If you've got a reasonable harvest, you probably setting aside

whatever your crop for food,

your crop for next year's crop,

and then if there was a surplus, maybe of grain,

you would maybe say to yourself, let's turn it into alcohol.

It's almost vermin-proof.

That was one of the other reasons they might have turned

a surplus stock of grain, to stop the rats and all the mice eating it.

Sometimes, we'll sit down and you get some of the older boys

coming in and they'll just reminisce about days gone by.

The great times, the good times.

They would say, "We'd go to a small house

and they would have a still running maybe for a week.

They wouldn't be seen for almost a month.

These men would disappear for a month!

What would happen to their farms during that time?

-You had your crops so...

-They timed it well?

It was always timed well.

Think of it, you had to work with the seasons.

You only had the grain coming in in September, October

and she used to have to leave it.

You would have a drink season as well? That seems very sensible.

That seems to be the best way to have alcohol.

There's a time for it.

When you have it all the time, it ruins the joy of it in a way.

When you earn it, it seems...

When you've earned it. You've done your year's graft.

'The method of distillation these farmers used was itself ancient.'

'Practised by the Egyptians, the Chinese,

'eventually the Arabs of the eight and ninth century,

'it is exotic like the kind of alchemy.

'It magically makes weak drinks strong.

'An enclosed vessel is filled with liquid

'containing alcohol in low concentration, and heated.

'Eventually, the alcohol becomes a vapour which flows through

'a spout at the top of the vessel into a coil cooled with water.'

'What slowly drips from the other end

'is alcohol in a more concentrated form.'

-Is something happening here now?

-She should be smoking!

I think there is some smoke coming out of there.

-Here she goes!

-That was brilliantly timed.

I can't believe it, did you press something with your foot?

'Like alchemy and all those other als - algebra, algorithm, alambic,

'the word itself is Arab. Al-kohl - alcohol.

'The purified.'

Right, Brian, I think you're ready for a wee taste.

I'll maybe try a little taste now.

Uisge-beatha, the water of life.

-As we say, gle mhath.

-Gle mhath.

-Slainte mhaith.

-Slainte mhaith.

Oh, my gosh. I didn't expect it to be so syrupy.

It's got a sort of oily...

It's got an oily thing about it. I never expected that.

-Enjoy that?

-Tell you in a minute.

-Don't go all away down to Dundee drinking.

-I won't, I won't.

I'll savour it.

There's a real taste of the land in it though.

Traditionally, we'd be taking that jug away, as they say in America,

and we'd be just passing it round.

'So this was how whisky started - as a white spirit

'ready to drink as it poured or dripped from the still.

'Made by farmers for themselves, or for barter,

'or in tiny quantities for sale.

'It was never likely to be more than a year old before it was drunk,

'and if people wanted to flavour it, they added herbs.'

There's something fundamentally honest about whisky.

It was a drink that rhymed with hospitality,

very much part of the rhythm of an agricultural society.

A token of welcome,

made as a gift as much as a store for energy for the winter months.

The Scots made whisky like the bees made honey.

'Some say that the first Scottish stills were set up

'on the west coast island of Isla, brought there by Irish monks.

'It might even be true.

'But with its eight distilleries, Isla remains an excellent place

'to go for a sense of whisky's central place in Scottish tradition.

'A nip in the morning, a nip at night,

a hospitable nip for visiting friends or neighbours.

'A drink to bring the harvest home,

'to mark the passing of time or the passing of people.'

Most people reach for a Scotch in a time of trial or retribution

or trouble. You reach for a dram. There's something a bit magical

about this spirit, that gives you courage and strength to go on.

I think that's why it's so useful at funerals

because on an island, you know everybody.

When somebody dies, you know them quite well.

It could be your best friend sort of thing.

-Some people get whisky buried with them.

-That's right.

-Do they?

-A few bottles in a coffin.

-To carry them over to the other side.

-Yeah.

-Better than taking the phone with you.

I used to play the pipes at funerals and weddings.

I used to always tell people that funerals were much better

than weddings because there's much more drink at funerals.

They're always better.

There's nothing better than a good funeral as long

as it's an older person.

It was a good send-off. They always had a good send-off.

No-one was ever rushed to their grave.

We still have it.

-A drink at the grave site.

-As soon as the body's down.

It's the old tradition.

We have oatcakes, cheese, whisky.

It also wets the baby's head as well.

It's almost the currency in the community.

Even I can remember when I was younger as well,

when your teeth are coming through, you'd get whisky put in your gums

to try and soothe the pain and stuff like that.

It used in all sorts of medicinal and currency and everything.

Integrated right into everything in the community.

This always seems to me that any excuse just to drink some whisky.

There's always a wee excuse.

'A good malt whisky goes down very easily indeed,

'but what happens in the brain as we drink?'

'Answering that question has occupied a large part

'of Professor David Nutt's current research.'

I took a drink of whisky, how does it affect me?

So, you take your wee dram, hopefully it's only a wee one.

Into the blood and then it gets in the brain.

Alcohol goes throughout the brain.

The way the brain works is that we have a chemical to keep us awake,

that's called glutamate, and we have a chemical neurotransmitter

that calms us down, and that's called GABA.

The first thing that alcohol does

is to turn on the effects of GABA to calm us down.

If it dampens down activity in this part of the brain,

it takes away worry

and that's usually what people are looking for alcohol to do.

They want to calm down and what to relax.

Then it starts to dampen down activity here which leads to

sometimes a feeling of energy and of being quite animated

and people start to talk more.

It also releases an increase in GABA

which allows chemicals called endorphins to release here

and that's associated with feeling good on alcohol.

Then as you increase your dose, ifs you take too much,

then you begin to disrupt the function

of this part of the brain which is called the prefrontal cortex.

This is the seat of self-control, self-regulation.

If you dampen down this too much,

people switch into that very disinhibited state,

you see in people who are sometimes very drunk.

That's often associated with violence.

Often people become very different.

Their personality changes, sometimes they just start breaking into tears.

They would seem normally quite self-controlled.

Then if you carry on drinking, as some people do,

what happens there is this part of the brain here

which keeps you breathing, eventually that gets shut off

and you stop breathing and die.

It's a pretty awful scenario.

That's why you shouldn't drink too much.

'In the early days, there were safeguards,

'limits to the amount of whisky.

'How much of your barley crop could you sensibly make into alcohol?

'Whisky was only made at harvest home and had to last a year.

'People drank constantly but slowly.

'This was whisky's dream time.

'It lasted several hundred years. Whisky changed very little.

'Sometimes in years of famine, the King or Parliament might pass

'a law against distillation, but the laws never lasted.

'People noticed new possibilities.

'Jim McEwan of Bruichladdich thinks whisky was first deliberately casked

'on Isla. It might even be true.

'Some time in the 18th century, someone noticed that whisky

'left in an oaken cask had changed in two ways.

'It tasted better, smoother and it had taken colour.

'It was a mild amber, a pale honey.

'The colour of a memory of a Scottish autumn afternoon.'

Somebody said to me,

"When do you start putting the flavour in the whisky?

I said the flavour started going in 100 years ago

when the acorn fell from the tree

and then the tree grows for 95 years.

At 95 years, the tree is cut down.

That's the age of the oak when they use it for barrels.

-It's 100 years ago.

-These are oak?

These are oak. Whisky can only be matured in oak casks.

Isn't that colour gorgeous? That's a natural colour.

We do not add any artificial colouring

or any other additives to our spirit. It's all pure.

What is the idea of you keeping this? This is 20 years.

-What are you going for on this?

-It's going to be released this year.

You're the first person in the world to try it. Yeah.

-Apart from myself.

-You don't count really?

I'm the guinea pig.

Here goes. Slainte.

That's about 50 per cent strength natural.

-Straight from the barrel.

-Oh, My goodness.

-It's good, isn't it?

-Oh, my goodness.

So elegant and sophisticated.

About April, starts to get warm in Isla and the heat builds up.

The alcohol expands inside the cask in the spirit drives into the oak.

The oak says, "Come in, come in. I really love you."

In goes the spirit and takes the flavour from the oak cask.

'Whisky aged in oak did taste better

'and it tasted better the longer it stayed in the wood,

'but nobody did much with this common knowledge.

'Who wanted to wait 10 years or 20 for a drink?

'For most people, 10 minutes was long enough.

'They drank their whisky white.'

'By the later years of the 18th century,

'whisky's long dream time was coming to an end.

'Slowly but surely, some people were becoming full-time distillers.

'Their whisky was for sale.

'Some of it was good

'and some of it was not.'

'Highland whisky, for instance, mostly made by small distillers

'tended to be well made and a pleasure to drink,

'but at the other end of the market,

'large-scale distilleries in the lowlands were engaged

'in the production of whisky of a rather different character.

'Two families led the lowland market -

'the Haigs and the Steins.

'Neither family cared much for quality but the Steins cared least.'

One of their distilleries

famously produced the worst whisky in Scotland,

but their contribution was genuine and twofold.

On the one hand, the Steins were ingenious and on the other hand,

they worked on a very grand scale.

'The Steins were industrial. In at the beginning of the process

'that would turn Scotland's central belt from something like this

'into something like this.

'Stein family distilleries were scattered all over southern Fife

'and Clackmannanshire near Stirling,

'connected by their own canals and railway lines.

'The Steins installed the first steam engines in Scotland.

'They constructed a harbour in the Forth to handle distribution

'and look for markets far afield.

'They were the first to export whisky,

'sending it to London where it was turned into gin.

'There's nothing left of their largest plant, Kilbagie.

'Kennetpans, the second largest, barely survives.

'It was certainly active in the 1730s,

'one of Scotland's earliest industrial locations

'and it's going to rack and ruin.'

Kilbagie alone had over 300 staff employed on site.

-Do you know how many people were employed here?

-I don't.

We have no record of that at all.

Any records state Kennetpans was two-thirds of the size of Kilbagie

so if you work it out that way,

you'd be talking maybe a couple of hundred, I would imagine.

-That's quite a big scale.

-It's massive.

For that time, it was absolutely huge.

'In this photograph from 1925,

'we get some sense of the original layout and scale of Kennetpans.

'The maltings and warehouses are 100 yards away, now hidden by trees.'

This is us now going into the warehouse complex.

My God, it's huge! Look at the size of it.

I've never worked out the square footage

-but an absolutely incredible size.

-It's incredible.

This place was built to last, wasn't it?

These Steins, they were serious about this place.

They had drive, innovation, and totally ruthless.

There was a distillery in Inverkeithing that upset the Steins.

All they did, they bought the mill upstream of it

and cut his water supply off, forced him out of business overnight.

See what I mean? They're like the Mafia. The Clackmannan Mafia.

They had no scruples at all.

They're quite a family.

MUSIC: The Godfather Waltz by Nino Rota

'The Steins weren't quite so ruthless as the Corleones,

'but they certainly enjoyed making the competition unrefusable offers.

'They certainly didn't enjoy paying tax.

'Not many whisky-makers did.

'In Edinburgh alone, in 1777, there were 408 distillers,

'God knows where they put them all,

'but only eight paid tax.'

'Most Scottish parishes were just as full of tax-dodging distillers.

'In 1783, a man of principle became Prime Minister.

'William Pitt the Younger.

'Think Eliot Ness, Al Capone's worst nightmare.

'Untouchable, incorruptible.

'Pitt looked upon the world of Scottish whisky

'and saw that it was full of corruption.

'He set about rewriting the rulebook on whisky tax,

but he made a mistake.'

He sought the advice of the Clackmannan Mafia

and the Steins told him

that small Highland distillers had unfair advantages

over big Lowland distillers like themselves.

William Pitt the gullible agreed

and drew the famous Highland Line,

declaring that whisky made in the Highlands

could not be sold in the Lowlands.

It took a Lowlander from Ayrshire

to plead the Highland cause,

a Lowlander who cared and wrote more about whisky

than anyone before or since.

From Burns' point of view,

it wasn't only a massive government abuse on behalf of the public purse,

it was also something that changed

a crucial and beautiful element of Scottish culture to him,

the small still, the quality product.

You see it in his poem The Author's Earnest Cry And Prayer,

where he actually points to Pitt.

Pitt is the "Premier youth" he refers to.

"Stand forth an' tell yon Premier youth

"the honest, open, naked truth

"Tell him o'mine and Scotland's drouth,

"His servants humble,

"The muckle deevil blaw you south if ye dissemble."

-Yeah.

-So it was a cultural change for Burns.

Everywhere, in the Ayrshire fields around him,

and then in the fields of Dumfries and Galloway,

there was evidence that the world of his father, of the plough...

-Right.

-..was coming to an end.

He saw that coming.

The pipes were starting to go up,

the machinery was starting to come onto the farm.

Burns was, in a sense, right there at that moment

where history just turned a corner.

Charles, what is the effect on the whisky industry after all this?

Well, I think that although William Pitt...

His agenda was to raise money,

but unfortunately,

in trying to straighten out the taxing of Scotch whisky,

he produced a system

which ultimately encouraged the production of rotgut.

Yeah, so the whisky,

it really did affect the quality of the whisky?

Absolutely, because the tax was based upon the capacity of the still

and the canny distillers, the bigger distillers, overcame that

by running the stills very, very fast

so as to produce much more, which was a filthy, horrible,

even sometimes poisonous spirit.

-Like toxic.

-Yeah.

-Burns described it

as, you know, "rascally liquor for the rascally sort of individual."

-It was low-grade stuff for the marauders.

-It was.

-And there was still a market for this?

-Oh, yeah.

-Absolutely.

And of course, it was the Steins

who produced toxic whisky in the largest quantities.

Whilst obeying the letter of the law, they made a hooch

that could, at its worst, make the consumer permanently blind.

If the public wanted whisky that was safe, let alone pleasant,

their only option was to break the law

and buy the smuggled product of the Highland stills.

William Pitt, the interfering busybody,

had turned Scotland's whisky industry upside down.

One eyewitness recorded the regular visits made to the town of Brechin

by Highland smugglers.

Having sold their whisky,

30 highlanders on horseback, proudly displaying their empty barrels,

would ride through the streets.

All the excisemen could do was watch.

All classes drank illicit whisky.

It tasted better and did less harm

than the legal booze of the Lowlands.

Even ministers of the gospel drank it on a daily basis,

like a cordial or a tonic.

Amen.

It was an absurd situation,

a fact that was underlined by the Royal Tour of Scotland

undertaken by King George IV in 1822.

George wanted the best of everything

and lots of it.

The whisky he wanted came from here.

The Glenlivet was a Highland whisky and therefore illegal,

but the King got his Glenlivet

and no-one tried to arrest him.

In the year after George's visit,

14,000 illicit stills were found in Scotland.

George's favourite whisky

was distilled by George Smith in just one of them,

in a glen best described as busy.

Apart from Mr Smith, how many other distillers,

illicit distillers were there?

Well, documentary evidence says

-there was over 200 stills in operation.

-200!

Now, 200, did they share the stills?

Did they do things like that?

But there was a lot of stills hidden up here. The population in the area

was a lot larger because the farming units were smaller in those days,

but perfect, remote area,

and then smuggle it out over the hills, over the coast to Elgin,

down to Lossiemouth, over the hills to Aberdeen there,

or take it down to Perthshire, the other way.

Clearly, the King's favourite booze couldn't go on being illegal.

In 1823, the government at last introduced sane whisky taxes.

No more Highland Line.

A flat tax per gallon of finished spirit,

a simple licence fee to have a still

and no stills smaller than 40 gallons.

George Smith was the first Glenlivet distiller to go legit.

Almost 200 years later,

the Glenlivet stills are rather larger

but in Smith's day, a 40-gallon still was already too big

for any part-timer with a barley surplus.

The truth is, 1823 signalled

the beginning of the end of Scottish honey.

Henceforth, whisky was a commodity to be bought and sold.

All over Scotland, the proprietors of illicit stills

saw precisely the same commercial opportunity as Smith had.

Within two years, the number of licensed whisky distillers

increased from 125 to 329.

That was a lot of legal whisky.

And there was about to be lots more.

This new world of sensible whisky tax

was too much for the Steins to resist.

In 1826,

Robert Stein secured a patent for an altogether new kind of still.

It made spirit from any kind of grain, and it was huge.

But what mattered most about the continuous still

was the fact that it worked continuously.

What have we got here?

Well, this, we're standing in the Girvan distillery

and what we're looking at here in particular

is the continuous distillation apparatus

for producing grain whisky spirit.

So this is still a still?

It's a still. Not as you'd have seen before, I imagine.

No! It's pretty big.

Yeah, if you think of, obviously,

the image of distillation, proper pot stills,

and this is really doing exactly the same on a continuous basis,

so instead of producing batches,

we start this still up

and in essence, it can run for days or weeks at a time.

The original design for Stein's continuous still

called for two linked copper columns 40 to 50 feet high.

It was improved on almost instantly

but the basics have never really changed.

Steam passes through at a high pressure.

Seams have to be perfect to prevent explosions.

This is applied science -

industry, pure and simple.

It produces thousands of litres of spirit an hour.

What this new still produced

was certainly immeasurably superior to the toxic rotgut

that the previous tax-dodging generation of Steins

had pumped as fast as possible down English and Scottish throats.

within limits of sensible consumption,

it was perfectly safe to drink.

Pleasant, in fact.

The grain whisky it made had a pleasing sweetness

and the new still made it in huge quantities.

It was nobody's plan or fault,

but the new grain whisky hit the market at the same time

as the vastly increased output of the new legalised stills.

More whisky than had ever been made before

flooded a newly urban Scotland.

People from the Highlands and Islands

who would have once made their own whisky

were moving into towns and cities,

becoming wage labourers.

Glasgow, first five years of the 1820s,

is boomtown. The population is going to go up by a quarter,

almost like one of these instant cities of the American West.

Drunkenness, I think, booms at the same time.

What do you think the prime reason for that was?

People were moving.

They were moving into towns at a rate they'd never moved before.

You had awful living conditions,

you had infant mortality all over the place.

You had to have, you know, some means of releasing what you felt,

so the dram is there as the drink of choice

and there's a marvellous quote from Hugh Miller, the geologist,

who was then a mason coming down from Cromartie

and saying that this was "happiness sold by the gill."

And if you were a mason working out in the wet,

or you were carting slabs of stone from the Clyde,

this was where you could sit down, just a place like this,

and get a holiday in half an hour.

Some holiday.

A holiday from rent, debt,

responsibility, hard labour,

life.

Men were often paid in pubs

and all their money ended up behind the bar.

The amount of damage done was truly horrendous.

The old days were long gone.

What the men were drinking in the bars and the shebeens

wasn't something that they'd grown themselves

and the decision to keep drinking was made while still drunk.

In other words, it wasn't a decision at all.

The 1820s and '30s are rich with the statistics of misery.

In 1822, it's estimated

that the Scots consumed just over 2 million gallons of whisky.

By 1829, that figure was nearly 6 million.

In Edinburgh and Glasgow, there was a bar for every 130 people.

The first temperance societies were formed in the 1830s,

struggling to deal with this perfect storm.

It was a huge, huge social problem

with which the temperance societies tried to wrestle,

from the kind of houses they were visiting,

where every stick of furniture had been sold to buy drink

and the people were in utter misery,

wearing rags

and the children starving

and that was attributed to drink,

where the husband on payday had just gone down the pub and blown the lot

and there's story after story.

The city missionary goes into different houses, and every house,

there is a woman with either a black eye or two black eyes

or broken limbs because her husband has been enraged in drink

and there's women thinking they'd do anything to get out of this.

-It's like a mass drink hysteria, in some way.

-It is.

You know, it must have been like

damming up this huge kind of flowing river, you know, of alcohol.

They had to go evangelical on it,

you know, "Go for a better life, sign the pledge now,

"forsake the drink, see how your life will change,

"Let's have concerts

"and different events without any drink,

"let's have enjoyable festive fun without the drink,

"let's build up the counter attractions."

The various temperance movements pulled in thousands of members,

but not enough.

They were trying to argue that poverty was caused by booze.

But for most working-class Scots, whisky wasn't the cause.

It was the anaesthetic.

They drank grain whisky, malt whisky, any kind of whisky,

to escape the often unbearable conditions of their urban existence.

Whether Scotland's whisky makers liked it or not,

this was their strongest market.

There were no significant exports.

If the English thought about whisky at all, it was as an outdoor drink

offered by a gamekeeper to sportsmen halfway up a Scottish hill.

Scotland's whiskies came from two kinds of still.

From the continuous stills, grain whisky flowed almost constantly,

sweet, light, lacking in character.

From the traditional pot stills flowed malt whisky,

often peaty and fiery, hugely varied.

One man's malt was another man's poison.

Cue the so-called whisky barons

who would mix the fiery malts and the sweet grain whiskies

to produce a new kind of product -

a whisky that would sell not just in England but around the world.

OK.

So...

This is grain. I'll just let you have a little sniff of it

before I put it in.

It's lovely. Smells good.

Yes, and you might be getting some vanilla coming through.

That's right, that what is. There's a wee bit of vanilla in it.

Now, I'm going to add some malt

so obviously this is a top secret,

-so you can't look at the labels.

-OK.

'The whisky barons were looking for a blend that was sweeter,

'blander and more consistent to open the door to mass-market sales.

'Then, and now, the recipes are secret.

'Dewar's most expensive blend contains around 40 different whiskies.

'My personal blend contains one grain whisky and two malts.

'Stephanie refused to tell me which ones.'

-OK.

-So I'm going to try this.

-There you go.

-The Cox blend.

-The Cox blend.

-So from this, you're getting a sweetness coming through.

-Oh.

-Gosh. That's...

-Well, that's a cask strength.

-Wow!

-So I'd give you a little bit of water.

-Wow!

-Save the head.

-Ah, God.

My ancestors would be re-emerging if I took much of this stuff!

So you see that when you add water to whisky, the whisky almost squirms.

-Oh, my God!

-And it then releases different compounds.

Now, that would last me a year

because you just want to drink that

-and you don't want to drink it...

-Savour it.

-Savour it. It's just...

It's lovely. Would you like to try?

Dewar's was only one of several companies offering blended whisky

but they had a secret weapon - the younger son.

Tommy Dewar was the sort of salesmen

whose foot stayed firmly jammed in any open door

and in 1892, he took his foot,

address book and sample case on tour

of almost the entire world.

Two years and 26 countries later,

he was back with 32 established export agencies.

The profits of Dewar's and Sons more than doubled within a year

and thanks to the effort of Tommy Dewar

and those of other travellers with perhaps only slightly smaller feet,

Scottish blended whisky went international.

Afternoon, sir. How are you?

I'd like a blended whisky, Scottish, please.

It conquered bars...

saloons,

hotels...

..in territory after territory.

By the late 1890s,

Scots blended whisky was available pretty much anywhere you went.

The export business boomed

and the English upper classes took to whisky too.

Dewar's and Buchanan both gained royal warrants

and contracts to supply the Houses of Parliament.

All the blenders dipped the same well for sales purposes -

kilts and whisky.

The Scots and their booze were inseparable,

married in the public mind.

In 1897,

Dewar's made the first ever filmed advertisement for an alcoholic drink

and here it is.

The message is, I think you'll agree, comically clear.

But how else would you sell it?

Scots and whisky go together.

Yes, but that message was for export only.

On Scotland's city streets and in its slums,

the relationship between the poor and whisky drinking

continued to be grimly close.

Temperance campaigners pressed for new laws.

They wanted alcohol banned, but the new laws they got fell short.

In 1903, the Licensing Act For Scotland

merely closed pubs early, at 10pm.

In 1909, the tax on domestic whisky was increased by 30%.

The Chancellor responsible was Lloyd George.

Lloyd George was far from unsympathetic to the temperance campaigners

and by 1915, as Minister for Munitions, he was openly arguing

that drink was a luxury Britain could no longer afford.

He called for outright prohibition

but once again, the laws that followed fell short.

The Immature Spirits Act of 1915

argued that spirits straight from the still did most damage,

decreed that whisky could not be sold

until it had been matured in cask for three years and a day.

Unable to sell any whisky for three years and a day,

many distillers and blenders went bust,

but it was the making of the whisky industry nevertheless.

All whisky would now improve in cask for a minimum of three years.

Scottish whisky became a product of unparalleled excellence

and smoothness - by accident.

Because we found ourselves in two minds when we looked at whisky.

It was our proud history

but also, it was our national shame.

In my hometown of Dundee,

prohibition was a burning issue,

best expressed by the surprising career of Eddie Scrymgeour.

Now, Scrymgeour was famous. He was actually almost mythical.

He'd beaten Winston Churchill in the General Election of 1922

and Churchill was hardly a pushover,

but Scrymgeour had beaten him on a single issue.

Scrymgeour wanted prohibition. He wanted alcohol off Dundee's streets.

Scrymgeour held his seat on the basis of that single issue

for another nine years

and elsewhere in Scotland, other voices were calling for prohibition.

Some licensing districts actually went as far as banning alcohol.

The general level of distrust for booze in Scotland was such

that more districts would certainly have followed, if it hadn't been

for America's ill-considered experiment with prohibition

between 1920 and 1933.

Good news for the criminals,

who gained control of the entire market for strong drink.

-Their only competition was each other.

-You dirty rat!

Good news for Hollywood -

raw material for 1,000 scripts.

Al Capone, jalopies,

snap brim hats, massacres,

G-men, tommy guns,

films we were still watching when I was a kid,

which gave us all a script, a lot of things to shout about

when we played on Dundee's backstreets.

-(JAMES CAGNEY VOICE)

-Top of the world, Ma!

You dirty rat!

Oh! Is this the end for Rico?

Prohibition was a failure.

In fact, if anything,

it encouraged the very thing it was trying to exclude.

A huge amount of the bootleg liquor

shipped into America during Prohibition was Scotch whisky,

the most reliable booze Americans could lay their hands on.

When Prohibition ended, it left a massive American market for Scotch,

which still exists today.

Do you think Prohibition worked? Does it work, browbeating anything?

Well, it depends on what your outcome measure is.

So if you were a doctor,

Prohibition actually reduced

the number of people dying from liver disease

but of course, the cost of that was this vast increase

in organised crime - in fact, the invention of organised crime.

In the end, society said, "The damage done by the crime

"is so much greater than the benefits, the health benefits,

"that we've got to get rid of Prohibition."

Nobel prize-winning economists have looked at this whole issue

and they have said prohibition maximises the profit for crime.

In the Dundee of the 1930s, the prohibitionist tide had receded too.

Eddie Scrymgeour had lost his seat

and the payday binge was alive and kicking.

One of Ian Fleming's models for James Bond was a Scottish writer,

Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart.

In his youth, officially a diplomat,

in reality a spy,

Lockhart was in Russia during the Revolution. He was not a timid soul.

In 1951, he published a history of whisky

and its inextricable involvement with Scottish identity.

He recalls walking down Dock Street in Dundee in the '30s.

"Every third house was a pub," he wrote,

"and every pub a vortex in which the week's wages were engulfed.

"The drinkers had spilled out onto the pavement, men and women,

"necking whisky from bottles

"and fighting with bottles in hand."

Lockhart was terrified.

And this is a man who's spent time in revolutionary Russia,

who'd even been locked up in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka Prison

on suspicion of attempting to assassinate Lenin himself,

and here he was, scared by Scottish drinkers.

It wasn't just Dundee, of course.

Other journalists and novelists

recorded similar snapshots of alcoholic violence

in the slums of all Scotland's major cities,

where people drank to escape

and the drink fuelled violence,

where drink and poverty and violence had become somehow traditional.

From the '30s to the '50s, it was the sort of reality

that documentary makers try not to capture.

You just get glimpses...

..between shots that try to tell a nicer story,

and fail.

The late '50s and '60s saw the first focused attempts

to eradicate both the causes and the consequences of alcohol abuse.

The eradication of slums,

the welfare state, the NHS.

And as for the booze, chancellors raised the domestic tax on whisky

to almost prohibitive levels.

Most whisky went abroad.

Whisky is one of the exports that did very useful war work

and is still carrying on.

One thing - we may not get the whisky here at home,

but, well, we don't get the hangover either.

The domestic whisky market gradually shrank.

The industry survived because of those booming foreign sales.

Successive chancellors kept the pressure on,

kept increasing the tax on whisky.

Even the great deregulator, who liked a whisky herself,

kept the genie firmly bottled up.

By 1993, a bottle of whisky somewhat smaller than this

cost almost £11 -

£7 of which was tax.

Adding tax to whisky is now traditional,

an established part of the Chancellor's script come Budget day

and whisky is simply too expensive for the binge drinker.

It's a luxury drink.

If whisky was the only game in town,

we would have solved the problem

but it isn't, and we haven't.

Where are we now in alcoholism?

Have we risen, has it risen?

It depends where you are.

Well, Scotland.

Scotland has seen the most terrible rise in alcohol-related problems,

so 20 years ago, Scotland had low levels of deaths from cirrhosis.

Now Scotland has the highest cirrhosis deaths

and England and Wales is following on,

but they're not as high as Scotland.

Scotland now has one of the highest rates of alcohol consumption per head

and some of the highest number of deaths from liver cirrhosis

in Western Europe

and Professor Nutt thinks he knows why.

It's completely clear to me that what has happened in the last 20 years

is that this massive influx of strong lagers, 8% lagers and ciders

has really fuelled alcohol damage.

Whisky may not be what they're drinking,

but we'd be lying to ourselves if we tried to pretend

that whisky historically hadn't functioned as the gateway drug.

The strong drink we traditionally abused.

Now Scotland's urban poor

have simply found something cheaper than whisky to drink -

vodkas, superlagers and ciders,

cheap fortified wine

and on average, Scots drink 20% more alcohol per head per person

than any other British population.

The only truly unchanging feature of this sad landscape,

the problem we seem unable to solve...

..is urban poverty.

When Robert Bruce Lockhart was winding down his book of whisky 1951,

he knew the notes he had to strike were bittersweet.

His walk down Dock Street back in Dundee

had filled him with sorry knowledge.

"There is no Scot," he wrote, "who does not know whisky's dangers

"and I myself have been near enough to destruction

"to respect whisky, to fear it,

"and to continue to drink it."

If Bruce Lockhart was writing today,

perhaps he would feel much less pressure

to apologise for Scotland's whisky industry.

After 200 years of the sometimes less than gentle heat

applied by Prime Ministers, chancellors, excisemen

and ministers of munitions,

whisky has become a completely different drink -

almost certainly made better and more creatively than ever before.

It's become a drink of international standing,

not just domestically, in Scotland or Britain,

but of the entire world.

90% of Scotland's whisky goes abroad.

The malt whiskies, for over a century seen

as mere ingredients for the mass market blends,

now command the respect of connoisseurs.

Individual bottles have recently sold for as much as £120,000.

Whisky is perhaps no longer part of the problem.

In fact, as one of the very few growth industries

left in the entire UK,

maybe it's part of the solution.

Are you surprised the number of barrels in here?

Well, we're going to need them all, Brian, because, you know,

the wealth of demand for Scotch whisky has never been better.

It's fantastic. It's a golden period

and it means so much to the economy of Scotland as a nation.

There's very, very few industries now in Scotland left.

There's no shipbuilding, there's no car manufacturer,

-there's no steelworks, no gold mines.

-No manufacturers at all.

So whisky's critical to Scotland.

Of the total wealth generated by exports from the UK,

both food and drink,

25% is generated by whisky.

-That's a huge amount.

-It's massive, it's absolutely massive,

so it's so important to this country.

Not bad for an agricultural by-product.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd